Time To Pray

Written by Maha Addasi, Translated by Nuha Albitar

Illustrated by Ned Gannon 

No Awards

 

 

Yasmin is visiting her grandmother, who lives in a country somewhere in the Middle East. On her first night, she's wakened by the muezzin at the nearby mosque calling the faithful to prayer, and Yasmin watches from her bed as her grandmother prepares to pray. A visit with Grandmother is always special, but this time it is even more so. Her grandmother makes Yasmin prayer clothes, buys her a prayer rug, and teaches her the five prayers that Muslims perform over the course of a day. When it's time for Yasmin to board a plane and return home, her grandmother gives her a present that her granddaughter opens when she arrives: a prayer clock in the shape of a mosque, with an alarm that sounds like a muezzin calling the faithful to prayer.  

 

I loved this book because it had the story written in Islamic and then translated to English. I would use this book as a read aloud for students so that we could have a conversation about the different ways that cultures pray and how we pray and if we pray. This would have to be a delicate conversation but I still think this would be an interesting book to read to my class. I would recommend it to age groups in fifth grade.